Experts love to say that meetings kill productivity. Unnecessary and poorly planned meetings certainly do. But some meetings are necessary. Meetings can seal new business deals. They can launch team on productive new ventures. They can correct course on a project gone wrong. And they can facilitate camaraderie among collaborators who are unable to be together in the same space. When you absolutely must have a meeting, you'll need some tips for holding more productive meetings, as well as the right software to do so.

Scheduling

Outlook probably comes to mind as the typical office software used to schedule meetings, but I find many of Outlook's features clunky and difficult to learn to use as intended. If all your meeting participants are skilled Outlook users, you can probably find a time to meet that works for everyone, reserve a conference room, and get that meeting on the calendar using nothing but Outlook. I need something simpler, and I'm somewhat of an organizational-tools aficionado, so I can only imagine how others might feel about Outlook as a scheduling tool.

Doodle.com is that simple solution. It's one of my favorite websites for planning meetings and get-togethers. Doodle.com is a free website and service that makes scheduling as simple as creating a poll. You invite people to the poll (by sending around a URL, or inviting them directly from Doodle), and they check mark times they're available based on choices the poll creator provides. It's an efficiency dream come true.

Webex and GoToMeeting are two of the most well known virtual meeting services that, in my experience, tend to be used by people whose companies already have an account with that provider. Paid accounts of either are packed full of features, such as the ability to record meetings, chat with other participants, share everything happening on someone's computer screen, connect multiple webcams, and much more. GoToMeeting requires an installed application install to use.

Webex does offer a free account (GoToMeeting does not), but it comes with some tight limitations. For example, only one person can host meetings, and the maximum number of people in the meeting is three. Everyone in the meeting needs to use VoIP because phone dial-in is not supported, and the host can share her desktop, whiteboard, and documents, but not applications or anything running remotely. So if you're using either of those services, you'll probably want the paid account.

Join.me is another popular option for hosting virtual meetings. Like Webex, it has a free option, but with loose constraints on the limitations. A free Join.me account accepts up to 10 participants in a virtual meeting, supports screen sharing and the ability to share control (i.e., hand over some of the hosting duties to another participant).

MeetingBurner (free; Pro accounts from $39.95 per month) is another option that runs in the browser with no installations required. With a free account, you can hold meetings of up to ten people, but VoIP isn't supported—Skype is, however, and works right within the service.

Skype isn't a bad tool for hosting certain kinds of meetings, but it's not always as reliable as some of the others. As with the other tools, a free Skype account comes with several limitations (no screen sharing is the big one for meetings, and video conferencing with only one other person), but it can be a convenient option when you need to quickly have an audio call with people who are spread out all over the world... and who already have Skype accounts.

Collaborating Face to Face

Most of the webinar tools named above facilitate online virtual collaboration, but when everyone is in the same room and can talk face-to-face, I like to use tools that are less management-intensive.

Google Drive (free) is handy in the office because multiple people can update documents in real time. You can see when someone else is editing or viewing the same document you have open. Google Drive isn't ideal on mobile devices, unfortunately. I still find it much easier to use on a laptop during meetings than via the Google Drive iPad app, for example.

Asana has taken the collaboration world by storm with its excellent online collaborative task-management (and project-management) tool. It's a great service to use throughout your work cycles, and shows its value during meetings for creating new tasks, such as follow-up actions assigned to people at the end of a meeting.

Taking Notes

Evernote (free to $45 per month for premium) is the 800-pound gorilla of note-taking, and I use it furiously during meetings. I love that it has built-in audio recording functionality that lets me capture the entire conversation in case I need to refer to it later. It's also superb on a mobile device for its camera feature. Snap a picture of a whiteboard, upload it to Evernote, and all the text in the picture is analyzed by OCR and becomes fully searchable.

Minutes.io (free), designed for the explicit purpose of taking meeting minutes, works in a browser but operates both online and offline. When you're asked to take official notes for a meeting unexpectedly, minutes.io launches quickly and works well, giving you a template for the task at hand.

About the Author

Jill Duffy is a contributing editor, specializing in productivity apps and software, as well as technologies for health and fitness. She writes the weekly Get Organized column, with tips on how to lead a better digital life. Her first book, Get Organized: How to Clean Up Your Messy Digital Life is available for Kindle, iPad, and other digital forma... See Full Bio

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